Why Digital Keeps Winning Despite Filmmakers' Reluctance

New Filmmakers in the Digital Age panel from the Tribeca Film Festival struggles with expense and expediency over emotion.

Last year the Tribeca Film Festival screened Side By Side, a documentary produced by Keanu Reeves that assayed whether the shift from film to digital moviemaking is inevitable and/or an improvement. In a kind of sequel this year, a panel of filmmakers with entries in Tribeca debated the merits of working in each medium.

All were recently confronted with the film versus digital decision for themselves. Three of the panelistsThe Pretty One director Jenée LaMarque, Run and Jump producer Tamara Anghie, and A Birder's Guide to Everything director Rob Meyerwere screening movies filmed in digital while Bluebird director Lance Edmands went with film but released his movie digitally.

Digital was loathe at first sight for most of the filmmakers. The first digitally shot films La Marque saw were Pieces of April and Tadpole. "I remember thinking they looked really bad," she laughed, "but I loved the movies so it sort of really opened my mind to it."

The panel was moderated by Panavision's Peter Brogna. Panavision is widely considered the premiere manufacturer of film cameras and entered the digital realm in 2002 with the Panavision HD-900F used to film Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones.

The blockbuster was the first digitally shot film Anghie recalls seeing. She remembered thinking that "it just felt very different than the previous films I felt more distanced even from the make-believe of it." When comparing the digital and film prints of her own Run and Jump, Anghie said, "I think there is still a softness in the 35-mil print. It's almost indescribable. You just kind of feel it."

Edmands pointed to Dogme 95 films like Harmony Korine's Julien Donkey Boy as indicative of when digital became an aesthetic choice. Whether moviegoers realized they were watching something shot with digital or not, those films benefited from the style of digital. Watching Lars von Trier's disturbing Dancer in the Dark without knowing how it was filmed, afterwards Meyer felt the rawness and immediacy of digital worked for the film.

Meyer tried to mimic traditional film on-set processes when using digital. He also shot on the Arriflex Alexa. "Alexas among them, certain digital cameras really behave like film cameras so we all just pretended we were shooting on 35[-mm film]," he said.

Edmands said that if you're going to make a low-budget movie under a million dollars (as he did), you have to fight to shoot on film (which he also did). "It has to be part of your strategy from pretty much the very beginning," he said. "You can't ever back down from it because that's one of the first things that people are going to try and chip away at."

Anghie and her director of photography, who had both only ever shot on film, really wanted to use film but didn't have the money and in any event, their locationIrelandno longer had film labs. "As much as I wanted to support shooting film, the big picture sort of dictated in the end for the benefit of the overall process we ended up shooting digitally," she said.

In LaMarque's film actress Zoe Kazan plays two parts, so shooting digitally sped up filming time, keeping it down to the average length of a regular film shoot, as opposed to taking twice as long. (Budget was also an issue.) To give the film a more vintage, film-like feel, she used Super Baltar lenses from the 1950s. "It gave us this nice artifacting," she explained.

Meyer also used vintage lensesCooke lenses from the 1960s. "It's a little soft and it takes some of the edge out of video," he said, adding that lighting was also crucial in creating a softer look.

Anghie managed to release a few prints on 35-mm film because some financiers required it as part of the deliverables. One of the film prints was used for the Tribeca screening, which felt like a gift to the director and cinematographer. "This is our world premiere and they really wanted to see it on 35-mm print, so as we were getting it anyway we just decided to get an extra print done for this festival."

Meyer said he preferred a film print for the quality and reliability of projection. "There's something about having a print where you're like OK, I know it's going to look at least this good and I know people know how to deal with prints that have been doing it for a hundred years," he said. Unfortunately both LaMarque and Meyer were unable to have 35-mm prints of their movies since they'd each reached the ends of their budgets.

Edmands shot on film, which he said contributed a tangible element to the film, and was part of its "emotional feel." Budget woes however, caused him to release digitally. "We just blew it all on the other elements," he said. Edmands hopes that someday there will be an opportunity to release Bluebird on film. "I'm hoping when it gets out into the world there's some old-school theater somewhere that demands film print."

Chandra is senior features writer at PCMag.com. She got her tech journalism start at CMP/United Business Media, beginning at Electronic Buyers' News, then making her way over to TechWeb and VARBusiness.com. Chandra's happy to make a living writing, something she didn't think she could do and why she chose to major in political science at Barnard College. For her tech tweets, it's ChanSteele.
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